e business
men of the city on terms of something like equality. In point of
leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a
business man knows in his whole life. I thus have what the business man
can never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stop
thinking altogether for months at a time.

I have written a number of things in connection with my college life--a
book on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and so
on. I belong to the Political Science Association of America, to the
Royal Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England. These things,
surely, are a proof of respectability. I have had some small connection
with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round the
British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When I
state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union
of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turco-Italian
war, I think the reader can form some idea of their importance. In
Canada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I have failed
entirely in Canadian politics, never having received a contract to build
a bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the smallest section
of the Transcontinental Railway. This, however, is a form of national
ingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this Dominion.

Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called
"Literary Lapses" and the other "Nonsense Novels." Each of these is
published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be
obtained, absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings
and sixpence. Any reader of this preface, for example, ridiculous though
it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for
seven shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous a character that for
many years it was found impossible to print them. The compositors fell
back from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air.
Nothing but the intervention of the linotype machine--or rather, of the
kind of men who operate it--made it possible to print these books. Even
now people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books
should never be put into the hands of persons not in robust health.

Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous
nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the
serious labours of the econom